Neil Mulholland, one half of the collaboration which established the Confraternity of the Neoflagellants, talks to Central Station about the fascinating themes behind the group's event taking place at this year's Edinburgh Art Festival.

'The Confraternity of Neoflagellants' - it's quite a name, how would you describe this collaboration to the uninitiated?

The Confraternity of Neoflagellants was founded in 2009 by Serjeant-At-Law Norman Hogg (then of The Embassy) and joined by Keeper of the Wardrobe Neil Mulholland (Edinburgh College of Art). It is a secular and equal opportunities confraternity bound by chirograph.

Well sort of. There has to be a myth of origin. Norman came up with the name and invited Neil to join him (Norman was the founding member). Norman set up a Facebook group and then we gradually invited new members that we wanted to work with. Most of the neoflagellants recruited to date were in ‘Avalon’ or wrote for it. There are more now. It’s based on medieval fraternities which are similar to itinerant social groups you find online and in cosmopolitan cities today. We are seeking to recruit other members to our crusade as well as find new disciples as we establish a wider Confraternity. We are transdisciplinary in this sense, we will wander to where we find something of interest and work in whatever way is suitable. For example, this is why we are working with Central Station - an archconfraternity – that mirrors the guild system as it was manifested during the development of the early world economy (c.1250-1350). The Confraternity of Neoflagellants is a Trojan for scholarly, hermeneutic and creative reflection upon what Central Station is, where it comes from and where it might go. Central Station is one lens through which this activity is filtered – a portal that makes our process visible and which enables the benefice to function at increasingly great distances of space and time.

‘neoflagellants’ because we are lay peoples dedicated to the ascetic application, dissemination and treatment of neomedievalism in contemporary culture. It’s a multiple name that allows people to come and go – in this sense it’s drawing on iconoclastic collectives like neoism and ‘pataphysics. We’re influenced by the ways in which the medieval concept of the commons is being re-established online, often in quite utopian ways (i.e. Folkmote / creative commons). It’s also prevalent in International Relations and related discussions of globalisation (a much more interesting way of seeing this than by looking at corporatism). This needs to impact upon art practice, the way that things are produced in technoculture seems far more exciting and open right now. There’s the sense of working on a production being more like making a film, that it might involve lots of people and morph during the process of coming together as everyone plays their part. We want to avoid auteurism and lose control of what we’re doing. So flagellants in the sense of inflicting unnecessary pain upon ourselves perhaps! The Confraternity of Neoflagellants doesn’t have to include Neil or Norm or anybody that’s been involved to date. It’s not a group like The Beatles and it’s not a collective either. It’s just a sensibility, a dynamic one at that. It can be taken on by anyone who wants to develop any of the ideas we’re working with (they aren’t our ideas after all, they belong to everyone).

Image: designed by Robby OgilvieTell me more about the event you'll be hosting at the Edinburgh Art Festival.

It’s called An Unco Site!, a line from Burns’ ‘Tam O’Shanter’. We changed the spelling of the line sight to site. (so it now reads something like ‘magnificent place’ in translation to English) We wanted to enact a spectacle in the form that Tam sees it and to relate this to the social production of place right now here in Edinburgh. We didn’t want to do too much to create this, the ghosts that Tam sees are ordinary in a sense, they are having a break from spooking people – they are relaxing after their work. It’s their leisure time. Our intention is to haunt an area of Edinburgh that is yet to transform into a place, a space that seeks to combine work and play. The walk we have planned is casual yet oddly transtemporal engagement with these spaces. The glass curtain wall of the reception venue is a physical boundary signifying history’s much-debated alterity. Overall the proceedings will combine psychogeography, micro-history and canonical mysticism with festival tourism to create a rich dialogue between all involved. It will engage the audience with the relationship between sight and site. Key to this is engaging with the invisible, in particular with itinerant service sector labour and the new quarters of the city that are yet to be inhabited.

There has been an escalation of this kind of work since the numerous heritage re-enactments that were part of Homecoming Scotland last year (our recruitment poster INVISIBLE LABOUR ISN’T WORKING refers to this, and has a nod to the ‘airbrushed-asian’ debacle). These workers are a particularly interesting example of post-industrial labourers, part of what Pine and Gilmore call The Experience Economy (Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1999). Herein lies the analogy with Edinburgh’s new towns, business and leisure areas that are attempting to generate a cosmopolitanism in harsh economic conditions. These neomodernist are a tabula rasa surrounded by the loaded Medievalisms, Victoriana and Georgian planning. Haunting a new building is intended to provide it with a phastasmic heritage, a pre-modern consciousness, a psychogeographical palimpsest of the kind of inhabitation that it is yet to enjoy. The analogy between post-plague medieval economic meltdown and zombie capitalism is quintessentially neomedieval as is the connection between today’s flash mobs and urban folk devils such as the infamous Edinburgh Mob of the Old Town.

Ricardo Marini will be one of the speakers at our symposium. He’s a very interesting planner from Edinburgh City Council (City Design Leader). We hope to investigate what’s happening with the city with him in more depth.

An Unco Site! is in three parts. Firstly there will be a flash mob and ghost walk through Edinburgh. We meet at the Scott Monument at 11pm on the 7th of August. We have a publicity campaign running at the moment that will be seen around Edinburgh in the run up to the Festival opening – INVISIBLE LABOUR ISN’T WORKING. It features lots of the sorts of ‘ghosts’ we’d like to see traipsing the cobbles on the 7th, including Peter Sellers and the cast of Rentaghost! We are attempting to recruit as many costumed actors and historical tour guides from the streets of Edinburgh as possible.

Secondly, once we have enough people gathered on the 7th, we will then walk to a secret location where an after party will be held featuring music from Paul Vickers & The Leg and Adopted as Holograph. There will also be a DJ set and some Vjing too. There will be free drinks at the party (until they run out). To get in all you need to do is dress appropriately, either as an historical figure or as a ghost and turn up at the Scott Monument on the 7th at 11pm. ‘Death’ will be on the door of the reception and will decide whether or not you get to pass over the Styx.

Thirdly we are holding a symposium on the 9th of August at Inspace in Edinburgh. This will feature:

Dr Mark Jardine (Scottish Historian, University of Edinburgh and author of BBC’s History of Scotland series)

Updates on what’s happening, including the location of the venue (announced at 10:45pm on the 7th of August) are available here: lightmotiv.org.uk

Neomedievalism is at the core of the project - where did your interest in this stem from? How do you see this theme manifested in the event?

There is a history to the long now that we’re working with. Neomedievalism embraces the spectral traces or ‘uncertain knowledges’ of its historical past as part of an ever-morphing, force-feedback simulation, (or permanent rehearsal) of coming events. The longing for a future assembled from a bricolage of pre-modern components embeds itself deeper with every advance in the technologies of representation. The fantasy must become ever closer to reality. The scholastic symbolism of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia - the principle map of dualistic medieval cosmology and a mythology important to the hacker intelligentsia of early Internet development communities - codifies the ecclesiastical space we are working in according to neomedieval gaming principles of grinding and leveling-up common in the ‘beige age of swords and circuitry’, the nerdosphere of MUD’s and MMORPG.

We will be speaking with world wide web pioneer and online guru Howard Rheingold about this in our symposium on the 9th of August in Inspace.

How do you want people to get involved?

We want people to get dressed up and walk through the city with us then enjoy the reception afterwards. If they aren’t sure what to wear, we have a few fancy dress shop sponsors in Edinburgh that will give you a discount on a hire if you mention An Unco Site! (see lightmotivorg.uk for more info). If they are also around on Monday the 9th then they are more than welcome to come along to our symposium – it’s open to all.

If someone really wants to perform or speak at An Unco Site! then they should contact us directly at info@confraternityofneoflagellants.org.uk

What role will Central Station be having?

Hopefully it will snare us a few ghosts and play host to some images captured by participants in the event. We are working with the filmmaker Matt Brown to make sure that all of An Unco Site! will be recorded and made available on Central Station and at our page confraternityofneoflagellants.org.uk in the form of a short film. We are also hoping to have live video feeds running into Central Station, fingers crossed with that...

And finally... what other events are you most looking forward to at Edinburgh Art Festival this year?

Saturday, 7 August 2010

This is the first part of the walk. Gather at Scott Monument at 11:00pm leave at 11:15pm sharp. Walk along Princes Street towards the RSA then take a left and walk past the National Gallery, up the Playfair Steps, cut across to the Writers' Museum Close (to the left of The Wash bar), go across the close to the far exit on the left corner, cross the Lawnmarket/High Street and walk down the right of George IV Bridge ('The King's Jaunt') to Greyfriars Kirk then down Forrest Road to Middle Meadow Walk and down no further than Peter's Yard. The final destination is close by and will be revealed when we get to Middle Meadow walk. We will wait there a minute until we have everyone. In case you get lost, we will post the venue at that point up here on lightmotiv.org.uk

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As the festival gets into full swing the living dead take to the streets in a prefiguration of our dark future

We live in neomedieval times. That’s to say that much of our contemporary condition has more than a passing resemblance to the Middle Ages, with its plagues, financial crises and globalisation. Yes, globalisation. According to the academic, artist and member of the art collective Confraternity of Neoflagallants, Neil Mulholland, the medieval period had a fully globalised economy. What is more, like our economy, the arse fell out of theirs too.

To fully appreciate the extent of what Mulholland is suggesting it may help to ignore him a little. His chat is like a dense and sprawling medieval city. Like intricate, gothic tracery, he weaves a complex tapestry of ideas and cultural references that includes both Marx and The Mighty Boosh. And likewise, he doesn’t shy away from blatant incongruity, using his iPhone to prove that we live in dark ages.

“We are lay peoples dedicated to the ascetic application, dissemination and treatment of neomedievalism in contemporary culture,” he explains of the Confraternity, which includes founding member Norman James Hogg. This is not a romanticising of pre-capitalist society like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood did over a century ago, Mulholland emphasises, but a way of deciphering the future – what they call premodern futurity. “Neomedievalism embraces the spectral traces of its historical past as part of an ever-morphing, force-feedback simulation of coming events,” he tells me, like a latter day soothsayer.

The Confraternity’s most recent show, Avalon, at Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, was in many ways a kind of manifesto proclaiming that contemporary life is once more imbued with the concerns that once preyed on the lowly serf and included work by Confraternity members Torsten Lauschmann and Alex Pollard. It displayed an eclecticism that reflected the diversity of the Middle Ages, with all its regional and ecclesiastical nuances. We’re confronted by a peculiar, ritualistic performance by the collaborative duo Plastique Fantastique and a mesmerising dramatisation of a chat room debate, or what is known as a flame war, about online gaming by the game art pioneer Eddo Stern.

As part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, the Confraternity has been commissioned to stage a ‘zombie walk’, called An Unco Site!, dedicated to Edinburgh’s ‘ghosts’. The ‘ghosts’, or ‘living dead’, in this case being all those who wear historical costumes to work, including street performers in historical garb and bagpipers kitted out in retro regalia. Beginning at the Scott Monument on Princes Street, the Confraternity looks to gather a crowd of all these lost souls – nomadic performers who have found themselves drawn to the city during festival time – to parade through the streets of Edinburgh in a homage to our advanced stage of crisis.

Setting off from the Scott Monument at 11pm on Saturday 7 August, the parade will wind its way through the city centre toward the old town, eventually arriving at an undisclosed venue where a reception will be held for the participants. The Confraternity encourages all those who wear historical attire for work to get involved, providing a social setting for the solitary performers to meet. The rest of us can choose to watch the parade go by or follow its progress into the depths of the ‘zombie city’.

Central to the parade is the city itself. With its origins in medieval times, new building developments around the docks and the Quartermile have seen the city transformed. A building boom followed by a swift depression has left brand new buildings unoccupied, again drawing comparisons with the undead. Both a camp celebration of the city’s nomadic labour force and a kind of ominous prescience of a bleak future, An Unco Site! looks to be a darkly pleasurable affair.

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is a not-for-profit production collective based in Edinburgh, Newcastle and London. Members of lightmotiv draw upon their considerable experience as artists, arts managers, curators and critics, working together to help each other realise their projects.